Sunday, November 4, 2012

Statistics

The news is out an you can find several sources out there. I will refer to the Reuters article that refer to an IDC research.

Some data :

Android represent 75% of shipment of smartphone in Q3-2012 (compared to 59% Q3-2011)

Apple represent 14.9% (compared to 13.8% a year ago)

Blackberry 7.7% (9.5% a year ago)

Symbian 4.1% (14.6% a year ago)

All this occurs in a very fast growing global market for smartphones : vendors shipped 179.7 million
units in 3Q12 compared to 123.7 million units in 3Q11.

This is a 45.3%
year-over-year growth !!! We are in a deep worldwide recession but this market is growing insanely fast.

Sales of Apple's iPhone 5s could represent between .25 and .5 GDP percentage point for the US economy according to this article (Guardian).

In
the process, Nokia, now owned (or at least operated) by Microsoft, is
officially out of the top 5 world vendor list. Symbian has been sacrificed by Microsoft execs (the actual Nokia CEO is/was the 8th largest individual Microsoft
shareholder) and there is nothing to save Nokia's market share (Windows RT/8 is
expected to produce some revenue in the following months).

All
in all, it appears like the perceived major player (Apple) is at best
second (vs Samsung : 31.3% vs 15%) but in fact if you consider the
Operating system, Android vs iOS it is even much worse (75% vs 15%). So
for any analyst, it really looks like the game is over...

Futurology

In a precedent post and various linked comment (Ipad Mini : copycat and end of innovation for Apple),
I was predicting that open ecosystems were inherently superior to
closed ones. The recent smartphone data sales for the current quarter
confirm this ... big time !

The speed of change is increasing
and Apple's position is less and less interesting : shareholders beware
(hedge funds, pension funds and individuals) : the time where being an
Apple investor was more interesting than being an Apple customer is
coming to an end ... and the end is very close.

I like
to compare smartphones to PCs : the main difference is that an open
ecosystem once again succeeded against a closed ecosystem. This time, in
this revolution, we won the operating system. The OS is open-source. The
applications (including their cloud component) are not.

Conclusion

My prevision is that, this is not enough.

I
really believe that open-ecosystem will produce open-like cloud systems
that will be open and not Google's or any alternate private company
exclusive property. The knowledge worker will rely exclusively on IT to
produce any desirable outcome.

The mobile revolution
brings us an open operating system, you can expect another revolution that
will bring us open-services (mobile or cloud based). Openness is key to
the evolution of humankind : having one exclusive company control part
of the ecosystem needed to produce knowledge is simply not sustainable.

If
such a company could maintain such a monopoly it would lead to an
Orwellian-like reality where humankind is enslaved to this company.
Don't be evil is a nice motto : it does not fit this dark vision.

On
the contrary : I really believe that digital natives (the latest
generation) will fully understand this and will propose and develop a credible
alternative to ensure freedom for all...

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Open Source Catalyst

Doctor des Ligneris has obtained a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Sherbrooke.
In the course of his studies, he was very active in scientific computing and has been
architect of several large scale clusters. He joined the OSCAR initiative
(Open Source Cluster Application Ressources, an open source community) and was elected
chair of the project for the year 2003/2004. Dr des Ligneris has obtained a postdoctorate
degree in distributed computing from the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal.

Before founding Revolution Linux, Dr des Ligneris was involved
in the University of Sherbrooke Linux User Group (the GULUS) as president.

In 2003, he co-created and developed EduLinux, a distribution specially designed for
the education milieu, with a standard set of applications and a selection of specific ones.
EduLinux was installed in different schools and school districts using regular desktops and thin-clients.

Dr. des Ligneris is CEO of Revolution Linux since his inception in 2004. He led multiple
high-level consulting projects involving large scale deployments and open source
softwares in education. He gave numerous talks at international conferences
on topics such as large scale Open Source deployments, Open Source in
education, thin-clients, high performance computing, virtualization, Open
Source in general, IT management...